Open or Closed? Nothing new about border debate

Worried the war might cut off their supply of cheap labor, the Texas Dirt Farmers Congress appealed to the federal government on Jul. 22, 1941 to reopen the border with Mexico.
Texas did not always have such a significant Mexican presence as today.  In fact, at the end of the nineteenth century, less than one Texan in 20 had ancestral roots south of the Rio Grande.  Even in cosmopolitan San Antonio, the Lone Star melting pot with a population of fifty-three thousand, Germans outnumbered Mexicans.
But the Mexican populace grew by 75 percent in the opening decade of the new century.  The annual influx surpassed the total number of Mexicans that settled in Texas during 300 years of Spanish rule.
In spite of the pittance they were paid, the eager immigrants earned more hard cash in a month than in a lifetime of back-breaking toil in their native land.  By American standards the newcomers were the victims of cruel exploitation, but to them Texas was paradise on earth.
The search for a better life turned into a flight for life itself between 1910 and 1920, as Mexicans escaped the carnage of their national nightmare.  An estimated 264,000 refugees sought sanctuary in Texas, and the vast majority remained long after the Mexican Revolution had run its bloody course.
Until the official closing of the international boundary in 1917, Mexican citizens were free to cross at will.  The battening down of the border was part of the joint U.S.-Mexico effort to restrict job seekers to contracted workers called “braceros.”  In reality this program, discontinued after the First World War, did nothing to slow down the human flow northward and succeeded only in turning legal immigrants into criminal “wetbacks.”
In the years between the wars, many farmers in the Lone Star State and throughout the Southwest developed a dependency on seasonal labor from Mexico.  The economic impact on Mexican-Americans in South Texas was devastating.  Entire families were uprooted and driven by desperation into the dead-end existence of migratory gypsies.
The exaggerated fears of the dirt farmers notwithstanding, there was an abundance of agricultural labor in Texas in the summer of 1941.  But in the panic-stricken aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the farm lobby had no trouble convincing the Roosevelt administration that crops would rot in the fields without the massive importation of Mexican harvesters.
Washington negotiated a revival of the bracero program.  This time, however, Mexico City drove a hard bargain insisting upon numerous guarantees concerning hours, working conditions, housing and health care not covered by the World War I agreement.
Farmers accustomed to dictating the terms of employment for foreign workers flatly refused to play by the new rules, especially the mandatory minimum wage of 35 cents an hour.  They retaliated by boycotting the braceros and pressuring Congress into lifting the lid on Mexican immigration.
The Rio Grande was reopened on May 11, 1943 only to be shut down three days later by the Immigration and Naturalization Service on orders from the State Department.  Seventy-two hours was long enough for Texas farmers to sign up 4,000 undocumented workers for the season.
Later that summer, coastal cotton farmers broke the boycott and filed a request for 63,000 braceros.  A government study revealed the applicants padded their real manpower needs by 300 percent in order to trap the transients into working for less than the guaranteed wage.
Meanwhile, Gov. Coke Stevenson was jumping through hoops to pacify Ezequiel Padilla, the Mexican foreign minister who had declared Texas off-limits to braceros because of alleged racial discrimination.  Stevenson pleaded for fair treatment of guest workers in a letter to law enforcement agencies and promised to set up a Good Neighbor Commission to investigate complaints of bias.  As a final gesture, the governor accepted an invitation to attend the independence celebration in Mexico City.
In return Padilla secretly agreed to the transfer of 5,000 braceros to Texas from the western United States.  But headlines like “No More Workers Will Go to Texas in Humiliation” in the hostile Mexican press forced the foreign minister to break his promise.
By keeping the Lone Star State on the bracero blacklist for the rest of the war, the Mexican government played into the hands of those farmers who had opposed the strings-attached policy from the outset.  They were perfectly happy with the powerless “wetback,” to whom nothing was owed not even respect and a decent wage.
In a classic case of talking out of both sides of their mouths, the very employers that profited from the porous border and the traffic in undocumented workers were among the shrillest critics of the phenomenal increase in the number of Mexican nationals who chose to make Texas their permanent home.  To hear them tell it, the so-called “illegals” must have dropped out of the sky!
Publication date for Bartee’s new book “Unforgettable Texans” is July 24. Order your autographed copy today by mailing a check for $28.80 to “Bartee Haile,” P.O. Box 130011, Spring, TX 7739 or order on-line at barteehaile.com.